As you might have guessed from my lack of blog posts over the past month, life has been a bit busy for me lately. I’ve recently gone through some schedule changes and the adjustment period is over, I think! Aside from needing to take advantage of the last bit of gardening weather for the season and getting bogged down with canning some excess produce we’ve been blessed to receive, I have been chipping away at some new recipes a little at a time.

Sometimes the process of creating and testing recipes can be exciting, discouraging, enlightening and funny all at the same time. The best thing about failures and near (or total) disasters in the kitchen is that they provide helpful information. Namely in the form of what not to do or what does not work.

Yesterday was one of those experiences for me. Any of you who know me well or have spent more than just a little time with me in the kitchen know I do not proclaim to remotely excel at baking. I do have a number of desserts which I have become known for and do get the urge to knead some bread dough every now and then, but these do not amount to actually being a pastry chef.

Eight years ago when my husband and I were married, the country club where our service and reception were held served these amazing chocolate chocolate chip muffins as part of our brunch. I had asked the club manager for the source or recipe for these muffins, but he never responded. Every now and then I think about these muffins and contemplate trying to duplicate the recipe (as if I could remember exactly what they tasted like all these years later . . . ). Yesterday was the day I decided to start my quest for the perfect chocolate chocolate chip muffin. I thought I would start out by adjusting my chocolate cake recipe. This is a solid tried and true recipe for me. I figured if I could make it a bit more dense all I’d need to do was add chocolate chips and I’d be done. Easy, right?

Well, maybe not so easy. Being the non-pastry chef that I am, I made the silly assumption that if a box of cake flour says to simply add two additional tablespoons of flour for every one cup of all purpose flour called for in a recipe all would be just fine. For starters I don’t know what possessed me to use cake flour when I always use all purpose flour in this recipe. I think it was because I wanted to get rid of the hardly ever used cake flour taking up space in my pantry. Whatever the reason, I bet several of  you already knew using cake flour was not appropriate for this application and could have saved me from my fate of flat, unattractive, cakey muffins. For those of you who didn’t already know cake flour does not work well for muffins, think of this as your tip of the day.

Hopefully I’ll have the courage to make an attempt at the chocolate chocolate chip muffins again. In the meantime if any of you have a really great recipe for chocolate chocolate chip muffins, I’d be eternally grateful if you’d be willing to share it with me!